El Zorro Remembered

James Robert Laidlaw, 66, died on April 18, 2012, with family by his side in Somerville, NJ, at Somerset Medical Center.

He was born on August 21, 1945, in San Antonio, TX, to J. Robert and Ofelia Onderdonk Laidlaw. A graduate of The Wardlaw School (‘63), Jim earned his bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Maine, Orono, in 1973. He met and married his wife, Judy, during his time in Maine. He moved his family to the Gulf Coast in Florida shortly after, but Somerset County, NJ, has been his home for the past two decades. Jim worked at the Barnes & Noble in Bridgewater for more than ten years.

He was an active member of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Bridgewater. He served on the vestry and as a Eucharistic Minister. A former member of the Log Cabin Gun Club, Warren, NJ, Jim was an exceptional marksman, who enjoyed skeet shooting. He was a card shark par excellence and an avid reader, with science fiction being a particular passion. Music of all genres narrated every aspect of his life. He also loved the outdoors and spent much time with his family at their cabin in the Adirondacks. Lastly, no one will ever be able to match his cheeseburgers on the grill.

Jim, or “Jan,” as only his granddaughter, called him, is also survived by his wife, his mother, and his children. He is also loved and remembered by his sister and his brothers.

The family requests that donations be made to MGH Bladder Cancer Research Fund, Massachusetts General Hospital Development Office, 165 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA 02114, in memory of James R. Laidlaw, in lieu of flowers.

Driving to Boston

I had to drive up to Boston this week. It was an exercise in futility at least as far as the reason for the trip. The trip itself, though, was somewhat interesting. It was interesting for a number of reasons. First, there were a huge number of semi's our on the interstates of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. This bustling evidence of commerce in action leads me to give credence to President Obama's assertion that the economy is, in fact, getting better. Another indication of a better economy was the number of cars on the roads. Even with gasoline edging over $4.00/gallon in many places. The roads on Wednesday and Thursday were being heavily used. Connecticut has started the summer ritual of road repair already (one of the benefits of a warm winter??) so I ran into a number (3 or 4) delays as traffic inched through the work areas. However, even this is evidence of returning economic health.

motherf#&$er

It wasn't enough that the bladder cancer was the worst type known to medical science. No. Now they have found cancer on the prostate. Now, the nice doctor at Mass General says that it is non-invasive and that all *hah* they have to do is "scrape" it off and I'll be good to go for the radiation and chemo treatment for the bladder cancer.

OK, my bad. It has been about a month since I wrote the above paragraph, and things have progressed. They did, in fact, have me in for another bout with the trans-urethral operating apparatus, and they did, in fact, scrap off more nasty little malignant cells. My urologist in Boston assures me that he is 99% certain that he got everything and that I should be good to go for the "treatment" except...

Way back in October, when I had my fist CT scan, they noticed something in my lungs. These were very small somethings, but I was told to have them looked at after the bladder cancer was dealt with. Well, after my two operations here in New Jersey, my doctor decided that I should have a PET CT scan of the chest just to see what was there. Well, long and short of it was that the little nodes did not light up, and the radiologist who examined the scan stated in his report that the nodes in my lungs did not react like cancer and were, therefore, not malignant and need only be watched over time. However, since the good people in Boston had not actually done the scan or been first to interpret them, they have decided that those scans were "inconclusive". So, then had me do another chest CT scan at Mass General which they also deemed "inconclusive." Now they have me scheduled for another PET CT scan the 1st of March. Hopefully, the results will be the same as they were here in New Jersey and that will be "conclusive" enough to get me going on the radiation/chemo program.

As it is explained to me, if the spots in my lungs should prove to be cancer, my treatment changes radically. The problem is that, right now, all the little bumps in my lungs are too small even to biopsy. That's why they put me on hold for a month. They want to see if anything grows large enough to do a biopsy on it. Of course, if anything does grow, that means the chances of it being cancer increase by a couple factors of 10.

So, I wait for March 1st to roll around and I try not to let it eat away at me. God, I do want this episode in my life to be over and for me to get on with things. I am so tired of waiting...

One of life's little surprises

Early last August I noticed a few drops of blood in my urine one morning. Not only did that little spot of pink wake me up, it made me most vigilant. When the blood continued to appear for a few days...not much, just a little pink tinge at the end...I called my doctor and made an appointment. She first treated me for a urinary infection (there was one present), and, when  the infection went away but the blood didn't, then she sent me to a urologist. Well, to make a long story short (and to avoid talking a lot about medical procedures--something I have little patience with when others do it) he found a couple small tumors in my bladder, and told me they had to come out. But, he added, not to worry because 80% of these tumors are the low grade type which are easily cured. Well, tra-la, my little cancers were of the 20% high grade variety which are not easily cured.

The cancer was formally diagnosed mid-October. I had my first trans-urethral bladder resection October 27th. It was when the pathology lab looked at the specimens from that operation that they determined that my cancer was of the high grade variety. That necessitated a second bladder resection which was done on November 17th. It was after that surgery that it was determined that the cancer had "invaded" the bladder's muscle tissue. This, I am told, is Not Good. So, "Not Good", in fact, that my urologist informed me that we needed to talk about complete removal of the bladder. Complete removal! All because there was one little speck of cancer on one small muscle tissue sample. I was devastated.

I should mention that, especially in males, complete bladder removal also means complete prostate removal. Removal of the prostate means the surgeon is messing around where the nerves that govern male sexual arousal are located. In the large majority of bladder removals, the ability to engage in sexual intercourse is also removed. Now, while sex is not absolutely necessary for my wife's and my ongoing relationship, it does add to it. And I am not ready to let that part of my life go yet, so I/we began to look for alternatives.

One of the problems with ebooks

So, I was going through some shelves when I came upon a stash of books I had purchased back in the early ‘70s. They were all non-fiction mass market paperbacks with an average cover price of about $1.25. Just for hoots, I checked Barnes & Noble to see if I could get any of these as an ebook.  Turns out there was one (Adam Smith’s Supermoney) that was available, but its price was $9.99. Now, why would anybody pay that much for a 40 year old book about what was happening on Wall Street and the economy in the early 70’s? Sure, my old paperback’s binding is starting to fall apart because the glue is 40 years old. I did glance at a couple of chapters and had a slight case of deja vu (what goes around, comes around: those who don’t pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it….and other pithy aphorisms) so it might be interesting to reread it. However, probably not…unless I can get an ecopy for under two bucks. Then it would be worth my time and effort.

The fact of the matter is that ebooks are still a mystery to most publishers. They haven’t a clue how to price them to make them truly attractive. The current pricing tiers for new books, while not optimal, can be lived with. Yeah, I’ll probably pay $15 for the new Clancy book as an ebook rather than the $20 it would cost me as a hardcover. The ebook is much more portable and easier to hold while reading than the hardcover, and I am not a collector so I don’t really care about owning a physical copy. However, I will not pay $15 or $10 or even $5 for an old (more than three years) mass market fiction book. Other than the truly rare book, popular fiction usually only sells a few copies a year by the time it is three years old because, let’s face it, most mass market fiction is pretty much crap.

What I want is the ability to buy a book and have it both as a physical object which I can use to decorate my walls and a digital entity which I can load into my portable reader and carry around with me. But I don’t want to pay $25.00 for a hardcover book and another $10 to $15 for the digital version. So, I have challenge for the publishing industry: come up with a way to give your customers both digital and physical copies of their books. Otherwise, piracy will be a major, ongoing problem for the industry.

A test...and a change of content.

OK, I have Drivel editor on my Linux laptop now. Drivel is compatible with Blogger, so I can use this without having to go through Firefox to post stuff to this Blog. I say this blog because I have another Blog over at Typepad. For the most part it has been a place where I rant in lonely splendor. But that is about to change. From now on, this space will be for personal entries...you know, entries about my life. This is where you will find the "horrible driver" rants and memoir-ish essays. Over on the Typepad Blog (elzorroviejo.typepad.com/blog/), is where I plan to do most of my socio-political blogging. In the past, I have done some cross posting between the two, but, from now on, I will keep this personal and that overtly political. Now, in the past I have pretty much kept my light buried under a bushel, so to speak. No longer. From hence forth I plan to publicize that blog as much as I can because I think that it is important to add as many voices against the Republican agenda as possible. However, it is also important to get actively involved: which is why I will be getting the hell off my fat butt and going out in the world doing.

life goes on

I'm not quite sure how to handle this. I mean, it is not like I'm the only person in the world to have ever been diagnosed with cancer. But it is a life altering event. The long and short of it is that I had three tumors in my bladder (had because they were operated upon Thursday last), and I have some suspicious nodes on one of my lungs that they want to look more closely at. I go back to my urologist November 7th to hear the results from the pathologist and to learn whether I have to go through this exercise again because they have to dig deeper to make sure they get all the nasties out of me. The real problem is that one of the tumors was not caught either by CT scan or by initial visual examination of my bladder in the doctor's office. (Don't ask: it involved shoving what looked like a very large tube up the urethra. 'Nuff said.) That leads me to think that it was a type CIS tumor, and that is not a good thing. However, I will learn the actual truth in about a week. I don't want to make too much out of this. The truth of the matter is that this seems to have been caught early, and the long term prognosis should be pretty good. On the other hand, I don't want to gloss this over as being relatively insignificant in my life...because it isn't. So, I will pretty much leave this right here...and get on with life.

Potholes

Potholes. They are, in fact, what is wrong with us right now. Well, not exactly the potholes themselves, but, rather, how we are dealing with them. Why, I ask, could this nation build tens...no...hundreds of thousands of miles of roads in the first thirty years (more or less) of the last century, but we have trouble filling the potholes in those roads today. I think I know the answer, and the answer is greed. In the  past forty years or so, we have institutionalized greed to a point where it is no longer considered one of the basic evils of this world.

"Gimme mine, and to hell with the rest of you." has become acceptable in our culture. It is, in fact, the mantra of the Republican party and their fellow travelers on the right edge of the political spectrum. Over the past 40 years, or so, this mindset has led to a massive imbalance in the distribution of wealth in this country. We have in fact become a two tier society with the middle class being squeezed to a point where it has shrunk to the smallest percentage of the population it has been in the last 100 years. In fact, today the top 1% of the population controls more wealth than the bottom 90%. The implications of this fact are huge, and they do not bode well for the future of our democracy.

Think about it. The primary purpose of all that wealth is to acquire even more wealth. As more wealth is absorbed into that vast pool, two things become true: first, there is less wealth available to the rest of the population which means we are all scrabbling after a smaller and ever smaller piece of the pie. Second, the pool of wealth becomes even vaster and it accretes at an ever increasing rate. It is like a black hole which is growing ever larger, and our nation's wealth is disappearing into it.

And this brings me back to potholes. We are not filling the potholes on our nation's roads, much less building new roads, because the wealth necessary is no longer available to society. We are rapidly become like the vision portrayed in Blade Runner where the rich live in palatially sumptuous surroundings while the rest of us live in squalor.  However, this future is not inevitable. There is still time to reverse this process of wealth accretion. The first step is to increase the marginal tax rate on income above [pick a number-open for debate-for argument's sake, let's use $500,000/year] to at least 90%. The second step is to break up large fortunes by instituting a graduated estate tax that taxes estates over [pick a number-let's say...$10 million] at, again, at least 90%.  This recirculates wealth through society. It means that the government can pay down debt, and fund current operations without borrowing. It means more money is available for entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. It means the middle class becomes stronger. It means the growth of an aristocratic class slows and (hopefully) eventually reverses.

The time has come to challenge the Right Wing of the political spectrum before it become too powerful. Allow another generation of wealth accumulation, and it will be too late. Even now the super-rich nascent aristocracy will fight tooth and nail to protect every penny in their coffers. However, right now, we still have enough wealth and the numbers to return us to the true path of freedom in this country. There will always be this tension between the rich and the rest. The goal should be, not the elimination of either side, but, rather, a state of balance between them. Sure, there will be tilts where one side or the other gains ascendancy, and, when this happens, the goal should be to bring things back into balance.

The time is now. We dare not fail in this task.

Depressed

Yesterday, I was within four days of finishing our sunroom addition. All that was left was the second coat of primer, two coats of final color and varnishing the door at molding. Now, this project started in November of 2008 when, to my everlasting shame, we let a salesman pressure us into signing a contract. Since then, very little has gone right with this project.

The whole thing was subject to us refinancing our existing mortgage. Well, that took about five and one-half months. We finally got our check the first week of May, 2009, and we promptly sent Tri-state Building Specialties a big check. They didn’t wander back until late September. Between October and December, they got about 80% of the room built, and then they went away again for four months or so.

Over that winter, we discovered that we had a couple leaks. When they finally came back, we told them about the leaks and they supposedly fixed them. By June of last year, they had pretty much finished. And I had paid them about 98% of what was owed on the job. I told them that I would give them the final check after the first hard rain so I could be sure that the leaks were fixed. They took the power cord to the heat pump to hold as hostage.

Sure enough, the first hard rain came, and the leaks were still there. So, I went out and bought another power cord (screw them!), and hired another contractor to deal with the leaks. Well, after shelling out more money than I owed Tri-state to get the leaks fixed, we thought we were good. Of course, by this time it was late fall of 2010. We were now two years into the project.

Now, Tri-state only builds the shell. All finish work is up to the homeowner. It took a little time, but I got Judy to go on a couple of shopping trips to pick out things like the slate floor tiles and to begin the search for sconces.

This is all so depressing.

To cut to the chase, it took us all last winter to do things like decide on the final color we wanted for the back wall and what kind of door we were going to put in. (Originally, we weren’t going to have a door, but the rain on the plastic roof is so loud that doors are a necessity.). I had to mud in the rough work the electricians did in installing the receptacles for the lighting in the room which, I admit, took a long time. However, we also found that to use that room in the winter meant we had to run the heat pump almost 24/7 and that just is not economically feasible for us right now! So, it didn’t matter that we had plastic sheeting in the archway leading out to the room all last winter.

The good news was that it appeared that the leaks were dealt with. We got through all the storms of winter without any further signs of leakage. Finally, last week after, now, two and one-half years of this project, I put the first coat of primer on the wall. And that brought out all the little imperfections in the spackling. So, I think I got most of them done, and yesterday, while it was raining very hard outside, I started putting the second coat of primer on the wall. And that was when I saw the signs of the leak.

So, now, at the least, I have to wait a week (mol) for the drywall to dry out. Then we have to decide whether to go back up on the roof and put a bunch more roofing tar in that corner where the sunroom roof and the main roof meet, or to bite the bullet and have the whole house reroofed. I was hoping not to have to deal with that, but it is beginning to look like a probability.

(Fill in a whole bunch of 4-letter words right about here…)

Ah spring...

I love my house! Here I am, out by the barbie on a cool spring night cooking pork chops and blogging on the Internet in between ministering to the chops. We went out and spent over $400 on stuff for the house at the Toy Store (otherwise known as Home Depot). Got all the molding for the french doors and three sconces for the wall. We also got a new faucet for the kitchen, but I digress. I've got to call our landscaper (also know as the lawn mowers) to arrange a meeting before his guys show up to do the clean out and lay the sod in the backyard. Just want to be sure we are all on the same page.

In preparation for their arrival with the sod, I place the stones for the stone border along the north boundary garden. I will wait until the sod is in before I trench and place the stones in their permanent homes.

OK, that's all I had on my mind tonight. Tomorrow I'll post something nasty about the Republicans and how they obviously hate the founding ideals of this nation.

Shutting down the government

The Republicans are making a lot of noise about this, but the truth is that they have another agenda entirely. Their goal is to subvert the democracy we have in favor of a plutocracy. They want the rich and powerful to rule and for the rest of us to serve that ruling class. That is why there has been the intense war on the middle class these past thirty years or so.

The current budget crisis is a case in point. Shutting down the government primarily affects those of us on the middle and lower rungs of the economic ladder. If the Republicans really had our best interests at heart, then they would be insisting the taxes on the rich must increase at the same time spending is cut. That is the only way the budget is going to be balanced. And, by the way, it has conclusively been proven that “trickle down” just plain does not work. The rich use their money to garner more of the stuff which means there is less in the pot for the rest of us.

No, if the Republicans were truly working for the good of the country, they would be addressing the disparity between the Haves and the Have-Nots. Another case in point: look at the move by ATT to acquire T-Mobile. Rather than use the billions of dollars that they (ATT) has in their coffers (in other words, the huge profits they have made on the iPhone) to increase pay to the their non-executive employees, they are trying to buy T-Mobile to make themselves even bigger. This is just wrong, but the Republicans don’t see it.

Some interesting bits from the media

I was browsing through National Geographic Magazine today, and, while there were some fascinating articles, on the whole it was a depressing experience. What NGM is telling us is that we are using up this planet's resources at a prodigious rate. I think or my well loved granddaughter and I worry for her future. What all of this is telling me is that, as a species, we have to get off this planet in big (and I mean in the billions) way within the next one hundred years, or we are going doom both ourselves and our planet.

Then I was skimming through Newsweek, and found this on page 4, "...from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They're sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been." We have poured over a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives wasted for no real reason. Once again we are presented with clear evidence that George Bush (the younger) was arguably the worst president of all time. As a result of his presidency, we are left with a crushing debt load, a weak economy and an increasingly isolationist, selfish and fearful national psyche. 

Slow morning at the bookstore

Yeah, it’s raining out, and, besides, Sunday morning is usually slow for the first two hours or so. Knowing that it was most likely going to be not busy, I snuck a couple magazines behind the counter to fill in the empty minutes. The first one I opened was March's copy of National Geographic Magazine.

Now, I love National Geographic. It has been a staple in my life since I first learned how to read. But, this issue depressed me. One of the center-piece articles as about the “Age of Man”, and how we are shaping the planet in ways similar to major geologic events such as asteroid strikes. The gist of the story is that we are burning through the planet’s resources at a prodigious rate. There is a three page foldout picture of one of the California oil fields which produces about 32 million barrels of oil per year. The story notes that this is about 9 hours of the world’s consumption of oil.

I think of my well-loved granddaughter, and I seriously worry for her future. I’ll be dead and gone when the oil wells dry up in fifty years (mol), but she, and her children, will have to deal with this reality. So, what all this is telling me is that we, as a species, have to get off this planet in the near future (next 25-30 years) and in a very big way (in the tens…hundreds of millions.) We have to bring the population of the planet back down to a sustainable level and we have only a little time to do ourselves. Otherwise, dear old Mother Nature will do the culling, and, dear and sweet as she is, Mother Nature’s methods tend to be very…painful for both those culled and  those left standing. If we don’t get off this planet, we are dooming both our species and our planet to a very dark future.

Leaving National Geographic, I picked up the current copy of Newsweek and began to read. I Didn’t have to get very far into it before I came across the following, “…from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They’re sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been.” We have poured over a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives wasted for no good reason. Once again we are presented with clear evidence that George Bush (the younger) was arguably the worst president of all time. As a result of his presidency we are left with a crushing debt load, a weak economy and an increasingly isolationist, selfish and fearful national psyche.

Re: Aaack…(aka. computer problems)

Well, that post was about 3 months ago. Let me relate how things progressed. First, it seems that Roger didn’t know what he was talking about. The problem was not the drives, the problem was the SATA controller on the motherboard. Now, seeing as how the SATA controller is integral to the motherboard, the way to fix it is simply to buy a new MB. Which I did. However, it was not the exact same model as the one originally in the ASUS case.
While I was waiting for that to arrive, I started poking around with the Dell to see what it's problem was. Turns out, it wasn’t the Dell at all. I have a Belkin port sharing switch which allows me to share keyboard/mouse/monitor between up to four computers. Well, I have a real old computer (still running Win98) and the Dell hooked up to that. I had some idea once about converting the really old Quantex into a Linux box, but that never quite happened. Anyhow, when the power went out, the Belkin box reset to default configuration. The really old Quantex is on port 1, the Dell is on port 2. When I switched ports on the switch from one to two, voila!, the Dell was right there. Oops, operator error.
So, back to the ASUS. I finally got the new MB in towards the end of January. Had it installed and ready to go the first week of February. I got the board pretty much naked. I cannibalized the CPU, memory, fan, video card, original hard drive and the new 500gb drive I had purchased to replace the supposedly bad 2TB drive I had originally got to fix my problem from the old setup. Once I had everything in place, I powered it up and (again) Voila! the ASUS was back. OK, it was not the same computer: it was a new computer in the old box. Still, I now had/have a working computer again.
Except that it glitches a little bit. Sometimes things are very slow and sometimes it freezes up entirely. Now, the slowdown could be because I have installed the full ZoneAlarm package, and  it, in its unswerving pursuit of perfect safety, sometimes does slow things down. The good news is that I am back to having everything working. And it only has taken me three months to reach this point.
Now that I think of it, I’m not sure this is all good. I’ll get back with a conclusion about that after I have had time to think about it.

2 am and I can’t sleep….

So, here I am at 2am with eyes wide open. I have to get up in about 5 hours, and the harder I try to fall asleep, the more it eludes me. Last night was inventory at the store, so I didn’t get to bed until 4am-ish yesterday morning. my circadian rhythms are all screwed up. I have jet lag without having gone anywhere. That and the fact that my granddaughter’s weird mother (they’re divorced so all she is to me now is my granddaughter’s mother) wants to take her out of the Montessori school she is currently going to, courtesy of my wife who is a teacher there, and put her into public school. This is not a good thing. The woman is certifiable. If I were even moderately rich, I would spend huge sums of money on lawyers to bury her in the system. By the time she got her head above water again, the granddaughter would be in college and living her own life.

Alright, maybe the 3 ibuprofen tabs I just took will kick in and I can get a couple hours sleep before facing another day in retail. Some aspects of my life really do suck…

Aaack...

I know...I know...I started something and it stands out there unfinished. But I have a good excuse: the dog ate my homework. No, actually I do have a good excuse: computer problems. First, my 6 month old ASUS stopped recognizing its hard drive. I ordered a new one (a great big 2TB Samsung SATA), but, when it arrived, there was no joy. The ASUS still wouldn't recognize this one either. So, I took drives and computer to Roger at PC Warehouse (Roger has helped me in the past with computer repairs beyond my ability) and he confirmed that the computer was, in fact, OK, and that it was the drives that were not working correctly. Fine.

I sent the Samsung back to the vendor with a request to replace. The replacement arrived and it too would not work. The ASUS BIOS kept giving me varying information about the capacity of the drive. It got it right about 3/4 of the time. But, when I tried to load Windows from the DVD, the setup program steadfastly refused to recognize the drive. So, with tears in my eyes, I sent this one back to Samsung with a request for a drive that actually has been tested and is known to work. When that one comes, I'll put it in the ASUS and determine once and for all whether it is the drive or the computer that is failing on me.

Howver, this is not the end of my problems. While the ASUS is doing a strong imitation of a doorstop, I have fallen back to using my 8 year old (MOL) Dell as my primary computer. Until yesterday. Yesterday, we had a power outage that, for the computer at least, lasted about 5 hours. (I unplugged it when the power failed, then spiked on and failed again. I didn't want surges to damage anything...) So, when I got home from work for dinner and plugged it in...nada! My guess is that the battery backup for the BIOS failed. (I am guessing that because I did get a warning about low battery the last time I turned the machine completely off.)

So, I am now down to my Linux laptop. All my stuff that I had on my Windows machines is locked up on HD's that I cannot get to. This is what I get for ignoring battery warnings and for not having this machine connected to my Windows network.

I'm going to give Roger a call to see if there is anyway he can get the old Dell back up and running. If that is a "yes", maybe by the end of the week, I'll be back in business. Also, the suspect HD reached Samsung yesterday, so, maybe, I'll have my replacement back by the end of the week as well.

Oh yeah, and my desk chair also died. I am not having a good month so far...I will get back to discussing the failings of the Tea Party as soon as I get past all of this...damn.

Tea Party agenda

Thomas Jefferson said, “"I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country,” As proven by the rise of the Tea Party, which gains virtually all of its real economic strength from corporate sources, we haven’t yet succeeded in this goal.

OK, My bad…I didn’t pay as much attention to the Tea Party and Sarah Palin over the past few months as I should have. I especially didn’t pay attention to their so called Contract with America, and I should have. I should have because it is one of the most seditious documents ever foisted upon the American public. Of course, the only reason most Americans did not reject it outright is because these are the same people who have been dumbing down our public education system over the past generation or so. When I went to school in the middle of the 20th Century, we were taught more than just facts. We were taught how to solve problems and how to judge the written word. However, these same folks who now control the strings of the Tea Party are the same folks who have been leading the attack on our public education system over the past generation or so. And now we are seeing the fruits of this dumbing down process: the American public can’t recognize when it is being raped and sold down the river into perpetual servitude.

So, since it appears that there is a significant portion of our electorate which cannot engage in critical thinking when it comes to…politics, I will try to do it for them, and I’ll do it in order. (All of the following is quoted from The Wikipedia article on the Tea Party.)

Number 1: Identify constitutionality of every new law: Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the U.S. Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does. (82.03%)

Well, this is just plain stupid. First of all, if a law is questioned about its Constitutionality, the correct course of action is to take it to the courts. That is what the Federal Court system is for. Second, if you take a minute (because that is about all the time it takes) to read Section 8 (Powers of Congress) you’ll see that it is broad and vague enough to cover a great deal. For example, take this: “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;” Basically, this gives Congress the right to enact laws that govern any economic activity whose effects cross state borders. That, my Conservative friends, includes activities which pollute the air and any lakes and/or rivers which touch two or more states. More to the point, every prospective law introduced to Congress goes through a vetting process which included a check of its constitutionality. Again, sometimes laws are passed which do not meet the criteria of constitutionality as set forth by the Supreme Court. Which is why we have such a court and which is why laws that don’t pass that Court are quashed. If you have a problem with constitutionality, take it to the court.

Number 2: Reject emissions trading: Stop the "cap and trade" administrative approach used to control carbon dioxide emissions by providing economic incentives for achieving reductions in the emissions of carbon dioxide. (72.20%)

This has nothing to do with constitutionality, this has to do with the cost of not polluting our environment. The Tea Party is simply fronting from their masters here. Besides, this is a market based method for controlling pollution that does not require government funding. What the Tea Party is proposing is simply another government program designed to benefit the wealthy and powerful at the expense of all the rest of us. Check the link to “cap and trade” above if you need more information on the subject.

Numbers 3 & 4: Demand a balanced federal budget: Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax modification. (69.69%)

Simplify the tax system: Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the Internal Revenue Code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words – the length of the original Constitution. (64.9%)

These two are actually part and parcel of each other. Of course, the agenda here is the eventual repeal of any taxes that impinge upon the wealthy, which would leave the government without the means it needs to govern effectively. That would mean that the rich could begin to carve up this country into their own personal fiefdoms. In which case, just guess who would end up down at the bottom of the socio-economic-political ladder? That’s right, the other 95% of the population, and that, I would guess, pretty much means you, gentle reader. One of the things our Founding Fathers were united in their rejection of was the creation of an aristocratic class. Dump progressive income tax and estate taxes on the great fortunes, and it would take only a generation to create such an aristocracy. Think about it.

OK, we’ll continue this in my next post. In my next post I will look at items 5 through 7.

Amazing stuff

If we are smart, there is a way out of the environmental mess we have gotten ourselves into. I was watching one of the handyman networks...DIY I think, where they were talking about some emerging technologies that (IMHO) hold a great deal of promise. The first thing they showed me was solar panels made pretty much out of the same stuff they make car bumpers out of. Basically, the photo-voltaic cells are embedded in plastic which is then molded into whatever shape is needed. The sheets on the show were made to follow the profile of barrel tiles, but, if you can do that, then you can make 'em fit any roof profile. These things are weatherproof and have and estimated life of at least 35 years. That means the homeowner gets about 25 years of straight profit from his roof.

The other product highlighted was a heat pump designed to remove heat from the fridgid air of our northern latitudes in winter. They showed a unit that could heat/cool and 1800 ft^2 home for about $1000 per year. In other words, this heat pump is a hugely more efficient use of energy. Instead of using fossil fuels to heat one's home, use electricity, preferably created by those solar panels on one's roof, to run this heat pump. Even if you are using electricity produced by burning fossil fuels, it is still more efficient than using that fuel in individual home furnaces.

Now all we have to do is get the Tea Party to see the light.

We're doomed...unless we can keep them the hell out of Washington, D.C.. Come November, do your part by voting AGAINST all Tea Party candidates. I don't care who you vote for as long as you don't vote for anybody endorsed by the Tea Party and/or Sarah Palin.

Another bit of proof that your banker is your friend.

The time between when you write a check and when the money is taken out of your checking account (also known as float) is now down to zero. If you write a check at someplace like my employer (a major big box specialty retailer), the check goes into the cash register and “BOOM” the cash leaves your account. Right then and there. There is no more two or three day grace period for checks.

However, this is still not true for the checks you deposit to your account at the bank. Show up with anything other than a paycheck or a government check, and you have to wait a few days for the money to show up in your account. That means that the bank has free use of your money from the time you deposit the check until the time it finally appears in your account. Now, you can’t tell me that banks that process E-checks for merchants can’t do the same for their customers. If I don’t have a float period anymore, then the banks shouldn’t have one either.

‘Nuff said….

Junk Mail

There is something wrong with this: I just went and looked at the Junk Mail folder for Thunderbird. This is the junk mail that gets through the filtering process provided by my various mail servers. Thunderbird has instructions to delete junk mail after 30 days. That provides me an opportunity (seldom taken) to review what is in my junk folder just in case Thunderbird made a mistake. Today was one of those rare occasions that I did look, but I wasn’t looking because I thought Thunderbird made a mistake. No, I was looking for another reason entirely.

I went and checked my junk mail folder because Thunderbird told me there were 862 unopened emails in that folder. That is 862 offers for Viagra and other worthless dreck. That 862 doesn’t include the regular ads I get from places like Amazon, Buy.com etc.- ads that I glance at before moving one.

All I can do is shake my head and marvel at the venality of the human race. First, the greed, avarice and lust (3/4 of these have to do with sex in one way or another) of the people flooding the net with these broadcast emails. Second, the stupidity and/or desperation of the people who actually answer these ads has to be enough to make it profitable to keep sending them out. And that is the key. If people just stopped answering these things, sooner or later the spammers out there would run out of money, or just get discouraged from the lack of results, and they would stop.

Yeah…like that would ever happen.